Leftoverlifetokill1

    And that is mine, how infinately preferable and so much more praiseworthy to be the first to go! The plucked cabbage stalks, in the wan back garden, confront me dismally; nature is great at rubbing it in; such a speaking likeness to my mood of pure uncompromising abandon. Not a whole life: the better in theory, and I hope the longest, half is done. For better or worse, mostly worse. Only the lesser declining half is left. What shall I do with this cumbersome object that nobody wants? It is no good gracefully reclining on the old abused stooge of indispensability; even the most adored, and unique people, whom to lose seems impossible: a positive whip-lash in the face of the human spirit; even they are not indispensable, once theyhave gone. And when I see, with my own two eyes, the gross and indecent speed with which the momentary cavity is staunched and made fast; with any handy courage and garbage of rhapsodical talk; then it would look hardly worth me flustering myself into a sweat of perturbation over my barely perceptible scratch on the earth's hard surface.
     Nevertheless it is me, and for that reason alone, important to me. Is there any more terrifying thought than, once me always me: unless you belong to that fortunate dolt category that positively exults in being not only their own true, sweet selves, but always the same; the greatest compliment of worth in Wales. And whichever way I turn, writhe, bluff, put on farcical disguises, dedicate myself to blindly shining higher missions whose purpose is holy sacrificial of me, but nebulously ambiguous when pinned down, it is clear as creeping grey unwelcome daylight, that I have no function in the world whatever.
     I just wonder how much more laborious waste am I expected to perpetrate; because the simplest automatic task, like swabbing a table, is a major scientific problem to me, with all the slow wits chugging at the one and only method of perfecting swabbing; and for what? I notice other people are not bothered by this kind of moron's hold-up in their work. And when an hour passes unchecked, instead of rigorously dinning in and jotting down the minutes, it is with a sense almost of triumph that I think: 'I killed that one humanely,' as though my dearest wish were to hurry up the process of time. Quite forgetting where I am so dementedly hurrying, and the ravages entailed on the halcyon graveward journey.
     But, if I have got nothing and am going nowhere, why all the noise, the discontent, the restless chewing, the ceaseless searching after a far-away and nameless, yet warmly satisfying, state: a cross between the inviolability of the womb, and the peak of creative elation; which under no known concentration of circumstances could possibly come about: or at least only once or twice in a lifetime. And why all the unnecessary quarrelling, arguing, laying down the law, moralizing, which nobody cares on way or the other about so long as they can have their own little say too. What an inheritance, and where does it come from?
     And why not settle down, and be my age, as those charming friends so pointedly insinuate; in fact, patiently resign myself (resignation, perhaps the most stifling word in the language). But how is it done, and what? I can merely envisage a broody hen sitting, fiercely depressed, on her eggs; ready to attack the first stray visitor; and what if there are no eggs to sit on? So I am led to understand that the above condition of atrophied coma is fitting and desireable for a woman of my years: clucking and preening, fluffing up her breast enviably stuffed with the feathers of virtue, locked with the claws of respectability. What makes her the terror of the coop, so much more deliriously young, than the sluggish, pudding young, is the whiff of decay forever singeing the tips of her wings and tugging at her tail. It is not surprising that she bursts into hectic, last-fling bloom; exploding seeds like an overripe sunflower.
     And however much I stare, however doggedly, into the idiotic mug of death: it is impossible to live alone as I have without becomming most familiarly aware of that pompous bore always sniffing around, and sticking his dull cold nose into everything; and never going; still I am unable, mentally incapable, of relating the dead thing, the broken body refusing to divulge why ort where the occupant has gone, to the thing that was alive. There is no touchable link between the two.
     The same endearing, childish hair; the heavy hulk-shaped head; the small, delicate, elongated, utterly useless, hands, that I used to call fins or mitts: there was a definate connection with the fish family. Perhaps they were the nearest, and hardest to understand, to bear; he was unborn again; and the barnacled accumulations through the years of good and evil, and corruption, and salvation; the manure that makes a character, had gone. Entirely gone.
     Dylan and dying, Dylan and dying, they don't go together; or is it that they were bound to go together; he said so often enough, but I did not heed him. I was as foolish as women are supposed to be, the traditional woman, paid no attention, took him for granted, was only concerned with how to express my own aggressive, demanding, frustrated, vile, jealous self. And look what he has done to me! How brutally cruelly am I punished; surely out of proportion to my misdoing. Let this be a lesson to all rebellious wives; but poor comfort to me.
     By such devilish devices, you'd swear there was somebody behind it with the lowest intentions; my rindy fruit of bitterness, already installed since childhood, though I can trace no evidence of suppression - it might have been more salutory had I been suppressed earlier and more thoroughly - swells to top-heavy proportions; dwarfs that happy landscape, colours with venom the smiling peasant. It even darkens the sun, pressing a ferocious torpor down behind my eye-pit sinews. My bitterness is not an abstract substance, it is as solid as a Christmas cake; I can cut it in slices and hand it round and there is still plenty left, for tomorrow.
     You have only to look at my hands; the very reverse of Dylan's; square, gnarled, awkward, unwieldy, chunks of flesh; as though born to the soil, and only fit for planting spuds. And the nails: a shameful reproduction of my mind: torn, bitten, bleeding; the dead skin unfurling in grotesque corrugations. My worst vice at the bottom of all my troubles, and disquietingly part of me. And I fail to stop; and God knows I've tried.
     They say; that horrible they, who are they? They say confession is a great relief, as liberating and loosening as a flood of tears, to the confessor. I don't agree - I find it unmitigatingly painful; a rough-going gallop that leaves me limp and expended.
     And how is it that this 'they' embodies the worst instincts of the community: of petty persecution? I am a permanent victim of their spite, because I do openly what they do in hiding; there is no worse sin to them than the flouting of conventions; what is not seen does not exist.
     Does the perversity of my nature now dare complain that: - having carefully and methodically cut off all family ties, deliberately antagonizing friends; and made myself generally as intractable, offensive, violent, and as similar to an infuriated wild boar from the horniest jungle as I know how, and that is something I do know about - that I am ostracized? It does. That I have no friends? It does. That nobody loves me? It does. Can insanity go further than that? All for the sake of the mythical, majestic, mountainous furrow I am supposed to be ploughing in my little stagnant ditch of endeavor.
     Then when I get a good old-fashioned kick in the teeth, the first thing I do is start snivelling for friends, blubbering and puking for mother; and all the distant, dimly remembered, soothing comforters of my indignantly shunned past. Every bone in my body aches individually with a dragging weariness of pain, and the joints cry aloud for a warm balm; honeyed oil, to be poured, engulfing me, into the rusty sockets. Soporifics, drugs, nectars, elixirs, etc., I want them all; anything to transform me, to make me different, to forget myself even for a second.
     But they only make me worse afterwards, when I come to, marooned on an island of reverberating drink; untouchable, unclean as a leper with my little bell of pain, which tinkles so intently with the insistence of an alarm on waking.
     He said he loved me; that I was the only woman for him; and, whatever the evidence to the contrary, I believed him, and still do; and I am grateful for that important bit of faith. There is, happily, no limit to the faith of human nature in believing what it wants to believe. But the sudden removal of such a love, such a special love, on such an immortal scale, and the only one, was bound to cause a dropping out of the bottom of my all-in-Dylan world.